Category: Trees

Did you ever pass an orchard with branches bursting with flowers and wonder how the trees “know” when to blossom or bear fruit all at the same time? Or perhaps you’ve walked through the woods, crunching loads of acorns underfoot one year but almost none the next year. Scientists from the University of California, Davis,…

Louise Ferguson, UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences and UC ANR, received the 2017 Outstanding Extension Educator Award from the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS). Ferguson is a UC Cooperative Extension Specialist and faculty member, starting in the Department of Pomology in 1984, then joining the Department of Plant Sciences when pomology merged into…

Summary: Tree-line species are shifting in the Great Basin of the U.S. Limber pine trees are ‘leapfrogging,’ slowly, over ancient bristlecone pines upslope. If limber pine trees block bristlecones from advancing upslope, bristlecones could face local extirpations. * * * * * Bristlecone pine and limber pine trees in the Great Basin region are like…

Quick Summary Trees in the driest, densest forests are most vulnerable to dying in extreme drought Effects of extreme drought on forests can take years to surface High tree mortality rates likely to continue as drought effects linger Why do some trees die in a drought and others don’t? And how can we predict where…

Quick summary Only about half of conifer trees regenerated five to seven years after wildfire in sites studied. Study spanned 10 national forests and 4 burned areas in California. Study presents tool to help foresters prioritize which lands to plant after a wildfire. A study spanning 10 national forests and 14 burned areas in California…

Fires used to be nature’s way of keeping forests healthy. They would burn slowly through the hills and forests of California every decade or so, clearing out underbrush and making room for more plants to grow and animals to roam. Forest fires seldom claimed mature trees, which were sturdy and hydrated enough to handle the…

By Dateline staff Dave Jones and Cody Kitaura, January 25, 2016 James A. “Jim” Beutel, a UC Davis pomologist who battled a devastating virus in a well-established fruit and helped in introducing two new fruits to California, died Dec. 28 at the age of 88 at a Vacaville, California hospital. Beutel was a lecturer, researcher…

University of California, Davis by Ann Filmer The genome of California’s legendary sugar pine, which naturalist John Muir declared to be “king of the conifers” more than a century ago, has been sequenced by a research team led by UC Davis scientists. At 10 times the size of the human genome, the sugar pine genome…

University of California, Davis December 9, 2015 by Ann Filmer Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have for the first time sequenced the genome of a commercial walnut variety. The information should accelerate the rate of breeding and variety improvement in walnuts and help breeders select for desired traits such as insect and disease…

Louise Ferguson, a faculty member and Cooperative Extension specialist in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, recently received the ASHS Outstanding Extension Publication Award for 2014 as co-author of the paper, “Transformation of an Ancient Crop: Preparing California ‘Manazanillo’ Table Olives for Mechanical Harvesting,” which was published in HortTechnology. Ferguson, who is honored to…